Pecans were a cash crop for my grandparents, who supplemented their unreliable farm income in any way they could. Unlike peanuts, the farm’s primary crop, pecans required no planting and almost no care, and they paid out every year so long as someone picked them up before the squirrels got there first. I was astonishingly old before I learned that pumpkins are food. The first year I was in graduate school there, a vine with large, squash-like leaves popped up in my raised beds. They were small, dense, pie pumpkins, apparently planted by the neighborhood squirrels.

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Persons: Pecans Locations: Lower Alabama, South Carolina